(User Research and Interaction Design) — Research
With GymShark selected, and the heuristic and competitor analysis done, the first thing our group had to do, was to understand more about the users and the target group.
We carried out the following research:
- Secondary research
- Questionnaires/Surveys
- User interviews
- Usability tests
Survey
We together created a general survey to learn more about the target audience of this type of app, and what were their main challenges related to exercising. https://forms.office.com/r/7PTFvbMjbH
Personas, Interviews & Usability Testing
In the meantime, each of us started to work on creating a persona (based on our discussions), and then we developed specific questionnaires to deep dive on their needs. This was one of the most interesting parts for me, because as a group we have selected the following personas (within the fitness world):
- Gymphobe
- Novice
- Advanced
- Personal Trainer
I got the Personal Trainer, and when I started to deep dive in and conduct some interviews, I realized that this persona was not aligned to our goals, as personal trainers are not the audience for fitness apps. Besides that, if we considered that as content creators, because of the app set up, we would not be able to go through the entire journey. So we agreed to change it for an Intermediary user, which would make more sense.
We also find out that Advanced users (high level athletes), are far less likely to use an app for exercising. So we saw, how important creating the personas and finding them to interview, was for our project.
Each of us conducted at least two interviews, and two usability testing with people represented by our persona.
After getting all work together (including user scenarios and customer journey), we decided to focus on the Gymphobe and Novice users. But carrying out interviews and usability testing for each of the personas, was very crucial to help us mapping out the main challenges in the current design of GymShark and understand in more details what the users expected from a fitness app.
At this stage, we had a much clearer view of what to focus on, so we could start defining the tasks.